Firefall

by Peter Watts

  "And what did it say?"

  She pointed at Stretch's first spiral: "Polyhedron star Rorschach are present."

  "It missed the scrambler."

  "Got it right the second time. Still, stupid mistake for something that can think rings around a vampire, isn't it?" Susan swallowed. "I guess even scramblers slip up when they're dying."

  I didn't know what to say. Behind me, barely audible, Cunningham muttered some two-stroke mantra to himself in an endless loop.

  "Jukka says—" Susan stopped, began again: "You know that blindsight we get sometimes, in Rorschach?"

  I nodded, and wondered what Jukka had said.

  "Apparently the same thing can happen to the other senses too," she told me. "You can have blindtouch, and blindsmell, and blindhearing..."

  "That would be deafness."

  She shook her head. "But it isn't really, is it? Any more than blindsight is really blindness. Something in your head is still taking it all in. Something in the brain is still seeing, and hearing, even if you're not—aware of it. Unless someone forces you to guess, or there's some threat. You just get a really strong feeling you should move out of the way, and five seconds later a bus drives over the spot you were standing. You knew it was coming, somehow. You just don't know how you knew."

  "It's wild," I agreed.

  "These scramblers—they know the answers, Siri. They're intelligent, we know they are. But it's almost as though they don't know they know, unless you hurt them. As if they've got blindsight spread over every sense."

  I tried to imagine it: life without sensation, without any active awareness of one's environment. I tried to imagine existing like that without going mad. "Do you think that's possible?"

  "I don't know. It's just a—a metaphor, I guess." She didn't believe that. Or she didn't know. Or she didn't want me to know.

  I should have been able to tell. She should have been clear.

  "At first I just thought they were resisting," she said, "but why would they?" She turned bright, begging eyes on me, pleading for an answer.

  I didn't have one. I didn't have a clue. I turned away from Susan James, only to find myself facing Robert Cunningham: Cunningham the mutterer, fingers tapping against tabletop interfaces, inner eyes blinded, vision limited now to the pictures ConSensus sketched in airspace or threw against flat surfaces for everyone to see. His face remained as empty of feeling as it had ever been; the rest of his body twitched like a bug in a spiderweb.

  He might as well have been. We all might. Rorschach loomed barely nine kilometers away now, so near it might have eclipsed Ben itself if I'd been brave enough to look outside. We had closed to this insane proximity and parked. Out there, Rorschach grew like a live thing. In there, live things grew, budded like jellyfish from some demonic mechanical substrate. Those lethal, vacant corridors we'd crept along, frightened of the shadows planted in our heads—they were probably filling with scramblers right now. All those hundreds of kilometers of twisted tunnels and passages and chambers. Filling with an army.

  This was Sarasti's safer alternative. This was the path we'd followed because it would have been too dangerous to release the prisoners. We were so deep inside the bow shock that we'd had to shut down our internal augments; while Rorschach's magnetosphere was orders of magnitude weaker here than within the structure itself, who knew if the alien might find us too tempting a target—or too great a threat—at this range? Who knew when it might choose to plunge some invisible spike through Theseus's heart?

  Any pulse that could penetrate the ship's shielding would doubtless fry Theseus's nervous system as well as the wiring in our heads. I supposed that five people in a dead ship would have a marginally greater chance of survival if their brains weren't sparking in the bargain, but I doubted that such a difference would make much difference. Sarasti had obviously figured the odds differently. He'd even shut down the antiEuclidean pump in his own head, resorted to manual injections to keep himself from short-circuiting.

  Stretch and Clench were even closer to Rorschach than we were. Cunningham's lab had been kicked free of the ship; it floated now just a few kilometers from the artefact's outermost spires, deep within the folds of its magnetic field. If the scramblers needed radioactive magnetite to function, this was the most they were going to get: a taste of the fields, but not of freedom. The lab's shielding was being dynamically fine-tuned to balance medical necessity against tactical risk, as best the data allowed. The structure floated in the watchful crosshairs of our newborn gun emplacements, strategically positioned to either side. Those emplacements could destroy the hab in an instant. They could probably destroy anything approaching it as well.

  They couldn't destroy Rorschach, of course. Maybe nothing could.

  Covert to invulnerable. As far as we knew that hadn't happened yet. Presumably Theseus could still do something about the artefact accreting off our bow, assuming we could decide which thing to do. Sarasti wasn't talking. In fact, I couldn't remember the last time any of us had even seen the vampire in the flesh. For several shifts now he had confined himself to his tent, speaking only through ConSensus.

  Everyone was on edge, and the transient had gone quiet.

  Cunningham muttered to himself, stabbed at unfamiliar controls with unpracticed fingers, cursed his own clumsiness. Stimulus and response flowed through lasers across six kilometers of ionized vacuum. The ever-present nicotine stick hung from one corner of his mouth for want of a free hand. Every now and then flecks of ash broke free and drifted obliquely towards the ventilators.

  He spoke before I could. "It's all in ConSensus." When I didn't leave he relented, but wouldn't look at me: "Magnetite flecks lined up as soon as they got past the wavefront, more or less. Membranes started to fix themselves. They're not failing as fast. But it's Rorschach's internal environment that will be optimized for scrambler metabolism. Out here, I think the most we can do is slow the rate of dying."

  "That's something, at least."

  Cunningham grunted. "Some of the pieces are coming together. Others—their nerves are frayed, for no good reason. Literally. Signal leakage along the cables."

  "Because of their deterioration?" I guessed.

  "And I can't get the Arrhenius equation to balance, there's all this nonlinearity at low temperatures. The preexponential value's completely fucked up. It's almost as though temperature doesn't matter, and —shit—"

  Some critical value had exceeded a confidence limit on one of his displays. He glanced up the drum, raised his voice: "Need another biopsy, Susan. Anywhere central."

  "What—oh. Just a second." She shook her head and tapped off a brief spiral of icons, as listless as the captives she commanded. On one of Cunningham's windows Stretch viewed her input with its marvelous sighted skin. It floated unresponsive for a moment. Then it folded back the arms facing one wall, opening a clear path for Cunningham's teleops.

  He called two of them from their burrows like prehensile serpents. The first wielded a clinical core-sampler; the second wielded the threat of violence in case of foolish resistance. It was hardly necessary. Blindsighted or not, scramblers were fast learners. Stretch exposed its belly like a victim resigned to imminent rape. Cunningham fumbled; the teleops bumped together, briefly entangled. He cursed and tried again, every move shouting frustration. His extended phenotype had been amputated; once the very ghost in the machine, now he was just another guy punching buttons, and—

  —and suddenly, something clicked. Cunningham's facades swirled to translucency before my eyes. Suddenly, I could almost imagine him.

  He got it right the second time. The tip of his machine shot out like a striking snake and darted back again, almost too fast to see. Waves of color flushed from Stretch's injury like ripples chased across still water by a falling stone.

  Cunningham must have thought he saw something in my face. "It helps if you try not to think of them as people," he said. And for the very first time I could read the subtext, as clear and sharp as broken gla
ss:

  Of course, you don't think of anyone that way...

  ***

  Cunningham didn't like to be played.

  No one does. But most people don't think that's what I'm doing. They don't know how much their bodies betray when they close their mouths. When they speak aloud, it's because they want to confide; when they don't, they think they're keeping their opinions to themselves. I watch them so closely, customize each word so that no system ever feels used— and yet for some reason, that didn't work with Robert Cunningham.

  I think I was modeling the wrong system.

  Imagine you are a synthesist. You deal in the behavior of systems at their surfaces, infer the machinery beneath from its reflections above. That is the secret of your success: you understand the system by understanding the boundaries that contain it.

  Now imagine you encounter someone who has ripped a hole in those boundaries and bled beyond them.

  Robert Cunningham's flesh could not contain him. His duties pulled him beyond the meat sack; here in the Oort, his topology rambled all over the ship. That was true of all of us, to some extent; Bates and her drones, Sarasti and his limbic link—even the ConSensus inlays in our heads diffused us a bit, spread us just slightly beyond the confines of our own bodies. But Bates only ran her drones; she never inhabited them. The Gang of Four may have run multiple systems on a single motherboard, but each had its own distinct topology and they only surfaced one at a time. And Sarasti—

  Well, Sarasti was a whole different story, as it turned out.

  Cunningham didn't just operate his remotes; he escaped into them, wore them like a secret identity to hide the feeble Human baseline within. He had sacrificed half of his neocortex for the chance to see x-rays and taste the shapes hiding in cell membranes, he had butchered one body to become a fleeting tenant of many. Pieces of him hid in the sensors and manipulators that lined the scrambler's cages; I might have gleaned vital cues from every piece of equipment in the subdrum if I'd ever thought to look. Cunningham was a topological jigsaw like everyone else, but half his pieces were hidden in machinery. My model was incomplete.

  I don't think he ever aspired to such a state. Looking back, I see radiant self-loathing on every remembered surface. But there in the waning years of the twenty-first century, the only alternative he could see was the life of a parasite. Cunningham merely chose the lesser evil.

  Now, even that was denied him. Sarasti's orders had severed him from his own sensorium. He no longer felt the data in his gut; he had to interpret it, step by laborious step, through screens and graphs that reduced perception to flat empty shorthand. Here was a system traumatized by multiple amputations. Here was a system with its eyes and ears and tongue cut out, forced to stumble and feel its way around things it had once inhabited, right down in the bone. Suddenly there was nowhere else to hide, and all those far-flung pieces of Robert Cunningham tumbled back into his flesh where I could see them at last.

  It had been my mistake, all along. I'd been so focused on modelling other systems that I'd forgotten about the one doing the modelling. Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions can be just as blinding, and it wasn't enough to imagine I was Robert Cunningham.

  I had to imagine I was Siri Keeton as well.

  ***

  Of course, that only raises another question. If my guess about Cunningham was right, why did my tricks work on Isaac Szpindel? He was every bit as discontinuous as his replacement.

  I didn't think about it much at the time. Szpindel was gone but the thing that had killed him was still there, hanging right off the bow, a vast swelling enigma that might choose to squash us at any instant. I was more than a little preoccupied.

  Now, though—far too late to do anything about it—I think I might know the answer.

  Maybe my tricks didn't work on Isaac either, not really. Maybe he saw through my manipulations as easily as Cunningham did. But maybe he just didn't care. Maybe I could read him because he let me. Which would mean— I can't find another explanation that fits— that he just liked me, regardless.

  I think that might have made him a friend.

  NIGHT SHIFT. NOT a creature was stirring.

  Not in Theseus, anyway. The Gang hid in their tent. The transient lurked weightless and silent below the surface. Bates was in the bridge­— she more or less lived up there now, vigilant and conscientious, nested in camera angles and tactical overlays. There was nowhere she could turn without seeing some aspect of the cipher off our starboard bow. She did what good she could, for the good it would do.

  The drum turned quietly, lights dimmed in deference to a diel cycle that a hundred years of tweaks and retrofits hadn't been able to weed from the genes. I sat alone in the galley, squinting from the inside of a system whose outlines grew increasingly hazy, trying to compile my latest—how had Isaac put it?— postcard to posterity. Cunningham worked upside-down on the other side of the world.

  Except Cunningham wasn't working. He hadn't even moved for at least four minutes. I'd assumed he was reciting the Kaddish for Szpindel—ConSensus said he'd be doing it twice daily for the next year, if we lived that long—but now, leaning to see around the spinal bundles in the core, I could read his surfaces as clearly as if I'd been sitting beside him. He wasn't bored, or distracted, or even deep in thought.

  Robert Cunningham was petrified.

  I stood and paced the drum. Ceiling turned into wall; wall into floor. I was close enough to hear his incessant soft muttering, a single indistinct syllable repeated over and over; then I was close enough to hear what he was saying—

  "fuck fuck fuck fuck..."

  —and still Cunningham didn't move, although I'd made no attempt to mask my approach.

  Finally, when I was almost at his shoulder, he fell silent.

  "You're blind," he said without turning. "Did you know that?"

  "I didn't."

  "You. Me. Everyone." He interlocked his fingers and clenched as if in prayer, hard enough to whiten the knuckles. Only then did I notice: no cigarette.

  "Vision's mostly a lie anyway," he continued. "We don't really see anything except a few hi-res degrees where the eye focuses. Everything else is just peripheral blur, just— light and motion. Motion draws the focus. And your eyes jiggle all the time, did you know that, Keeton? Saccades, they're called. Blurs the image, the movement's way too fast for the brain to integrate so your eye just—shuts down between pauses. It only grabs these isolated freeze-frames, but your brain edits out the blanks and stitches an — an illusion of continuity into your head."

  He turned to face me. "And you know what's really amazing? If something only moves during the gaps, your brain just—ignores it. It's invisible."

  I glanced at his workspace. The usual splitscreen glowed to one side—realtime images of the scramblers in their pens—but Histology, ten thousand times larger than life, took center stage. The paradoxical neural architecture of Stretch & Clench glistened on the main window, flensed and labeled and overlaid by circuit diagrams a dozen layers thick. A dense, annotated forest of alien trunks and brambles. It looked a little like Rorschach itself.

  I couldn't parse any of it.

  "Are you listening, Keeton? Do you know what I'm saying?"

  "You've figured out why I couldn't—you're saying these things can somehow tell when our eyes are offline, and..."

  I didn't finish. It just didn't seem possible.

  Cunningham shook his head. Something that sounded disturbingly like a giggle escaped his mouth. "I'm saying these things can see your nerves firing from across the room, and integrate that into a crypsis strategy, and then send motor commands to act on that strategy, and then send other commands to stop the motion before your eyes come back online. All in the time it would take a mammalian nerve impulse to make it halfway from your shoulder to your elbow. These things are fast, Keeton. Way faster than we could have guessed even from that high-speed whisper line they were using. They're bloody superconductors."


  It took a conscious effort to keep from frowning. "Is that even possible?"

  "Every nerve impulse generates an electromagnetic field. That makes it detectable."

  "But Rorschach's EM fields are so—I mean, reading the firing of a single optic nerve through all that interference—"

  "It's not interference. The fields are part of them, remember? That's probably how they do it."

  "So they couldn't do that here."

  "You're not listening. The trap you set wouldn't have caught anything like that, not unless it wanted to be caught. We didn't grab specimens at all. We grabbed spies."

  Stretch and Clench floated in splitscreen before us, arms swaying like undulating backbones. Cryptic patterns played slowly across their cuticles.

  "Supposing it's just— instinct," I suggested. "Flounders hide against their background pretty well, but they don't think about it."

  "Where are they going to get that instinct from, Keeton? How is it going to evolve? Saccades are an accidental glitch in mammalian vision. Where would scramblers have encountered them before now?" Cunningham shook his head. "That thing, that thing Amanda's robot fried— it developed that strategy on its own, on the spot. It improvised."

  The word intelligent barely encompassed that kind of improvisation. But there was something else in Cunningham's face, some deeper distress nested inside what he'd already told me.

  "What?" I asked.

  "It was stupid," he said. "The things these creatures can do, it was just dumb."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Well it didn't work, did it? Couldn't keep it up in front of more than one or two of us."

  Because people's eyes don't flicker in synch, I realized. Too many witnesses stripped it of cover.

  "—many other things it could have done," Cunningham was saying. "They could've induced Anton's or, or an agnosia: then we could have tripped over a whole herd of scramblers and it wouldn't even register in our conscious minds. Agnosias happen by accident, for God's sake. If you've got the senses and reflexes to hide between someone's saccades, why stop there? Why not do something that really works?"